She rarely grants interviews and undermines the authority others might claim given her talents and family. Her humility is active, her obscurity intentional. ‘he greatest writer there is,’ wrote Eileen Myles of Howe, who has, however, eschewed fame. It is the environment.’ With a majority of her books – published by independent and experimental presses – out of print, to be a reader of Fanny Howe is to be a seeker. Howe’s books, all fifty (at least) of them, track these moves: as she suggests in this interview, place informs her writing ‘completely, like being dropped in water. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before moving an estimated thirty times in six decades – spiralling around New York, Massachusetts and California states, with volleys to Ireland, where her talented mother, Mary Manning, was born and raised – only to settle back in Cambridge in her seventies. Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography.
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